


Don't Lie Shaking In The Early Morning Frost

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2012-04-28
Packaged: 2017-10-27 22:18:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A smutty, angsty post season 6 AU.</p><p><i>Ask them later, how it happened, and Meredith will give you some half-empty answer about too-expensive tequila and rusted blood stains.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



Ask them later, how it happened, and Meredith will give you some half-empty answer about too-expensive tequila and rusted blood stains. She'll lace the words through with an inexplicable explanation about how she'd never have made a good mother anyway, so perhaps it was all for the best.

“Maybe...?” Like it's a question to answer your question. Which will completely undermine the purpose of her carefully constructed lies.

She won’t notice it.

Addison's eyes will glaze over. Tears she no longer allows herself to shed in the company of others. Her fingers will work at the hem of her shirt as she smiles and laughs and pretends they all got what they wanted in the end. She might even have you believing her...

Just.

And Alex, Alex will just shrug casually, one-shouldered, and blame it on Derek. For getting shot. For dying. For leaving him as the sole consolation prize for two women that deserved so much more than a half-assed surgeon with a bullet where his heart and lungs used to live.

His fingers will run the ragged length of the scar tissue on his chest and he won't even register that he's doing it. He'll shrug again as he trails off. Unconvinced, but in a way that feels wholly familiar to him.

He's more than used to coming in second place after all. Third place.

Last place.

 

 

 

He wakes with a tube of soft plastic wedged between his teeth and the vague memory of being torn inside-out still skittering through his misfiring synapses. The taste of blood, his own he guesses, stirs a roiling nausea deep in his gut as voices in his periphery argue with words he can't begin to fathom.

He chokes then, and they fall silent. Drowned out only by the white noise and static that vibrates incessantly beneath his rib-cage. Fingers claw at his face. There's blood under the nails, a faded dark brown that mesmerises him for a beat before the endless night rises up to meet him once more.

Black and black and infinite black.

Dead eyes that don't blink and the drip, drip, drip of brain matter that doesn’t actually matter at all anymore.

 

 

 

The soundtrack remains the same. There’s no tube this time, but the voices that screech twin trails through his veins echo, shocking.

He wants to tell them to shut the hell up. To get out and leave him the hell alone. He can’t understand why they’re even hanging around. All vicious rebukes and shrieking. Not one heady inch of them seems familiar to him, despite the fact that they, the two of them, know him best of all.

Best of anyone that’s left anyhow…

 

 

 

Bailey or the Chief tell him about Derek. Or maybe it’s Hunt. Or Yang. Or someone else that was never his wife. McDreamy’s. Past or present.

It makes very little difference now.

Meredith tells him Izzie never came back to check on them.

Spits the words out of spite and grief and a thousand other emotions she refuses to admit to. He doesn’t have the energy to fight back and so he closes his eyes instead. Holds his breath until the monitors sound their shrill warnings

And then holds it some more, just because he can.

She slaps him the second time he does it and he’s grateful for the momentary distraction.

 

 

 

His release papers are signed on his birthday. The discharging doctor, a resident he recalls seeing half a dozen times over the course of his stay, offers a tentative _happy birthday…?_ as he stiffly shuffles down the hallway to the elevators.

He veers off at the last minute. Takes the stairs for a reason he can’t quite fathom until, suddenly, he absolutely can.

It’s half an hour later and he calculates he’s made it down one and a half floors.

He has no idea how many there are between him and the exit and he can’t really bring himself to care either. Sits instead and wonders how long he’d have to stay right there before he became a solid statue no-body bothered to notice anymore.

Gives it twenty seven minutes, tops.

 

 

 

He hears them coming long before he sees them. Sighs around the vast emptiness that is threatening to swallow him whole and prepares for the inevitable.

Isn’t disappointed.

 

 

 

The house is too big for them. The three of them. He feels lost in its open spaces. Sucked into the drywall and suspended, ghost-like, from the curtain rails.

He steals Addison’s keys from the depths of her ridiculous hand-bag and takes three days to drive to Los Angeles. Turns his phone off at the Oregon border and doesn’t bother to switch it back on again until his toes are submerged in the vast Pacific Ocean.

He feels lost and he likes it.

Her apartment is very _Addison_. And if he were functioning at all, he’d probably feel bad for tracking sand across the hardwood. But he’s not and so he doesn’t. Shrugs at his reflection in the floor to ceiling mirror and tries to earmark the parts of himself that he still recognises.

Doesn’t get very far.

 

 

 

Meredith arrives first. Which isn’t necessarily what he’d been expecting.

He hadn’t been expecting anything.

She screams at him, words he doesn’t bother to listen to. Lets them bounce around inside his skull as tears leak down her face and mix with the sand he’s littered across the floor.

He shuts her up with his tongue between her teeth. She resists at first. Thumps her fists against his chest viciously and screams into his mouth. He tightens his grip on her hair and drags her forward. Notes the moment her knees rise and her thighs grip at his hips.

The pressure is excruciating.

It is exactly what he wanted.

His fingers disappear into her cotton panties, come back out again, later, smelling of the sex they’ve never quite managed to have before now.

 

 

 

Addison’s arrival is much more sedate. She’s not angry with him and he’s inexplicably disappointed by the fact.

They take bottles of tequila down to the beach and fuck in the sand while Meredith sleeps on the couch. Her hair tangles around his wrists and the mascara she’d carefully applied ends up in streaks to her chin. He laughs as she swipes at it and makes the whole mess worse.

He thinks he likes her best like this.

Raw.

She wraps her arms around him in the aftermath and trails one finger lazily over the scar tissue that zippers across his ribs. He goes still beneath her touch and pretends he’s anywhere but _right there…_

Waits with baited breath for her hand to dip a little lower and erase them both into the oblivion they’re desperately searching for.

Isn’t disappointed this time.

 

 

 

If they eat then he doesn’t remember it. He remembers drinking though. A steady diet of tequila and beer.

No limes.

They end up in the shower. The three of them. He starts to make a smart assed remark about saving water, but Meredith’s on her knees then. Her face firmly between Addison’s legs.

He forgets what words are in that moment. What they mean. How to use them for effective communication. Straddles Meredith instead and lets his own tongue do all his talking for him. Steam and the sound of water pounding at the base of his skull.

Meredith turns. Switches her attention.

He’s not sure how she drew the short straw but he’s not complaining.

Not surprisingly, she is very good at what she does.

 

 

 

It becomes something of a ritual after that. An arrangement that is never actually verbalised. The bed is more than big enough for three of them, and words were never really their style anyway.

 _It is what it is_ as they say… Whoever ‘they’ are.

A coping mechanism of sorts.

There’s a steady stream of knocks at the front door. Phone calls that go unanswered and emails that remain steadfastly unread. He supposes that Meredith keeps in contact with Cristina but never bothers to confirm the fact.

Its answer is irrelevant after all.

Addison disappears every now and then. Keeps up the ruse of work and public grieving that is expected of her.

Nothing was ever expected of him and he suspects the same can be said for Meredith.

The fact is both a blessing and a curse. They celebrate their luck with the designer booze Addison insists upon and punctuate their misfortune with fingernails raked across paper thin skin.

A paradox of sorts.

 

 

 

He dreams of gun-shots and bullet holes and wives that die in arms that were never truly strong enough to hold them all together anyway. Bus drivers that don’t stop and brains that turn to mush and leak out towards your toe tips across the cold linoleum floor.

Babies that never get a chance to be babies, blood leaked between thighs and hearts that never actually beat. Empty threats and brothers that strangle little sisters while mothers sit back and watch the show.

Pregnant girls that were never really pregnant at all and wrists slashed open. Wide.

Vomits and wakes up covered in a sheen of slick sweat.

Feverish to his hollowed out core.

Ghosts laugh from the corners of the room. Mocking. Too many faces to keep track of.

Too much madness to think he could ever be sane in the end.

 

 

 

There’s a screeching ambulance ride across town that he doesn’t remember getting. And the plastic tubing is looped across his face this time, instead of jammed between his teeth.

He’s learned to be grateful for small mercies.

Addison tells him the bullet is gone while Meredith sits and pouts in the chair across from her. Chin on her knees like she’s the five year old he can never imagine her having been. He’s still uncomfortably hot inside his own skin. Itchy and wrung out.

He refuses to look at his bandaged chest. Fights against the constant urge to be sick until they both leave and he can breathe again.

Shallow and panicked.

Counts down the seconds until he can run once more.

Plans his exit strategy and is more than a little surprised when he never actually manages to carry it through.

Thinks, tomorrow. Or the day after that…

Or the day after that…

 

 

 

It’s different this time. The sex is slower. And the aftermath a little less metaphorically bloodied. It’s started to mean something to them and he knows without having to ask that this was not the plan.

 _Dependence, need, reliance_. Different names for the same thing.

He wonders, absently, who’ll be the first to leave.

Would once have been confident in his own well-adapted flight mechanism, but isn’t so sure he’s got the energy required these days.

Silently dares the both of them to abandon him first.

They don’t.

Which is the first surprise.

 

 

 

The second is Meredith’s declaration that she’s now gainfully employed. He stares at his fists and feels the pasta they’re eating turn to concrete and lead in his gut.

His default is to assume it’s anywhere but where he is.

She finishes her sentence with Cedars-Sinai and admits she used her mother’s name to get a position in their general surgery program. Grins.

Means it.

Addison raises her eyebrows over the rim of her wine glass. Perfect twin arches of surprise.

And pleasure.

She reaches across the table and offers up her congratulations. Seals it with a long kiss that has him going hard right where they sit.

 

 

 

He runs through the motions of pretending to do the same. Types up a resume using two fingers to strike at the keys and gets Addison to proof read the final copy.

She offers to mention his name to her colleagues in neonatal. He offers up a stammered stream of excuses that he does his best to make sound like stubborn pride and indignation.

Refuses to admit the truth. Even to himself.

The stack of printed pages spelling out his qualifications sits right where he leaves it for weeks. Gathers coffee rings as the sun curls the corners a light golden yellow.

They’re gone after that. Shredded. Or so Meredith tells him.

She buys him a second hand guitar with no strings and says he can sing for his supper if he’s too shit scared to pick up a scalpel.

She is only half joking and not for the first time he laments that she knows him too well.

Carefully constructed walls merely a mirage he can no longer pretend to hide behind.

 

 

 

He convinces the owner of wine bar three blocks over to give him a corner to set up in and free booze as payment. He’s not convinced this is quite what Meredith had in mind.

But as she uses her teeth to tear at his underwear just minutes after his first successful gig, he guesses she’ll put up with the arrangement for now. Arches his head back and lets himself enjoy it as she sucks him off with expert finesse in the dimly lit cellar surrounded by dusty bottles of vintage wine that stand guard, sentry-like.

It’s a long way from Seattle. It’s even further from Iowa City.

It feels like home.

 

 

 

He meets Addison for lunch-dates.

A euphemism.

It takes him three hours of sitting on the beach staring hard at the sun before he can bring himself to walk through the hospital doors of his own free will.

And even that delivers reminders of times he tries hard to forget.

She’s wearing pale blue scrubs and she smells like surgery and gore and other phantoms that set his pulse to sky high.

He tears her out of them and coats her with the scent of sex and sweat. She writhes beneath him and bucks her hips in a manner that has him grinding her name between his clenched teeth. He comes all over her chest as he pulls out, slick, slides his fingers into her to finish the job.

Deep and sure.

He’s done this before.

 

 

 

The irregular gigging becomes a full time job of sorts. Calendar pages turn and the hot California sun sinks a little lower in the sky.

He almost forgets what it feels like to be cold through to his core.

Cristina comes to visit. Which only serves to answer the questions he’s never bothered to ask.

She looks at them like she’s seeing them all for the first time, and the shift is tangible. He’s sad for her.

She looks lost.

He knows the feeling.

She’s got a strip of extravagant diamonds on her ring finger and she fiddles at them constantly. Uses her thumb to twist them round and round and round until he’s dizzy from the motion. He’s not convinced she knows she’s doing it and he doesn’t bother to mock her obvious discomfort.

He’s no longer denying that he’s changed.

She leaves again without really saying goodbye and he sees Meredith heave a sigh of carefully guarded relief that is not quite careful enough.

He thinks he understands the feeling all too well.

 

 

 

He keeps waiting for the cracks to appear and is always more than a little shocked when they don’t.

He’s asked to open for a local band that has developed quite a following. Takes a deep, steadying breath and recruits a drummer and another guitarist to expand his sound. Starts writing his own lyrics and lets the other boys create the music to back them up. He never was any good at that crap. They laugh and joke and make sarcastic comments about his secret man-pain, even though he deliberately keeps the tracks obtuse.

They’ve met Addison. They’ve met Meredith.

He thinks they probably know there’s nothing ordinary about their arrangement.

Or what it has stemmed from.

Laughs along with them as they make comparisons to names he’s never heard of before.

 

 

 

They get an invitation in the mail for a memorial none of them have any intention of attending. It’s signed from _Chief of Surgery, Miranda Bailey_ , and he smiles at that.

Runs his finger reverently across the letters that make up her name and vows to call her one day to just say hi.

Knows he never actually will.

Five years have passed.

They tear the invite into little pieces and let the early evening sea breeze scatter the remnants across the sand. Dancing.

He rolls onto his back and looks up as the clouds lazily reform and shift and disappear above their heads. His fingers coil into separate fists.

Twin anchors he could never imagine doing without.

He grins to himself and squeezes back. Communicates without words in a way he knows they will both understand.

Says _thank you_ , and _I’m sorry_ , and _I’m glad we’re all right here_ a thousand times over.

Says _I love you both with everything that I have_ several thousand times more.


	2. Tell Me You Will Wake Me

Meredith looks at him sideways and barely swallows her incredulous disbelief when he first hints at it. He shrugs and smirks and tells her not to pretend she’s never wanted to fuck a surfer boy.

She retaliates fiercely. Spits past triumphs into the air between them, a challenge of sorts.

He thinks she’s probably lying but history tells him that’s not necessarily the case.

He doesn’t bother to ask for clarification. Figures, the less he knows the better these days.

Addison offers to put blonde tips in his hair, laughs breathlessly and wonders out loud whether he even owns a pair of board shorts.

He stares back at her blankly and realises this may not have been his most cleverly thought through plan.

Meredith helpfully suggests he go naked, and he takes her words as an invite to lay her across the kitchen counter and make her scream his name into her own balled fists while Addison watches on, piece of toast hanging lazily from two fingers as she forgets, momentarily, how to chew.

 

 

 

The boys in the band are more helpful. Offer him suggestions that are only half tongue in cheek and appear genuinely concerned for his safety.

_You do, like, know how to swim, right?_

They know which side their bread is buttered on.

He tells them to fuck off nonetheless.

Plucks idly at the strings of his guitar and refuses to speak for the remainder of the rehearsal time they’ve been allocated.

 

 

 

Mark Sloan arrives on their doorstep early one afternoon. Which is about seventeen different levels of fucked up. He watches Addison as she moves through the house and he can’t help but feel kind of sorry for the guy.

After all, he did save his life. Once upon a time.

But they don’t talk about those days. Figments of imaginations that try so very hard to forget. He thinks, absently, that it’s quite possible Mark lost even more than he did that day… Dried blood that settles into patterns he can’t quite bring himself to look at.

It’s well past midnight when he decides sixteen is definitely too many tangled limbs to keep track of. Stronger hands than he’s used to tugging insistently at his hips and the panic riddled ghost of familiar fingers, feather light over faded scar tissue.

He stiffens under the touch. Both literally and figuratively, until Meredith erases all the tension in the only way she knows how. Her tongue across his teeth and the length of her curved spine arched high above him.

Addison apologises later. He shrugs and feigns a nonchalance he hasn’t felt in decades.

Feels something shift in their dynamic that sends him reeling. Out of control.

And in free fall.

 

 

 

The surf is stronger than he expected. Froths at his calves and drags him forward insistently before shoving him backwards towards the shore again.

The push and pull feels achingly familiar.

He forgoes lessons, and simply watches instead. How to duck under the on-coming waves in time to avoid having your face smashed with acrid salt water. How to lay across the board and paddle. How to stand up.

How to stay up.

How not to get swallowed whole by the pounding blue-black ocean.

The swirls of heavy cumulonimbus clouds overhead are ominous. A dare of sorts.

The dislocated shoulder says he loses in the end.

Can’t even bring himself to be surprised.

 

 

 

He’s on the deck sulking when they come home. Right arm strapped to his chest in a make-shift sling. Humming along roughly on a combination of pain killers and beer.

They fail to note his presence at first. Wind whips sand against the side of his face, stinging, as they press one another up against the glass of the French doors. He smirks his lips into a knowing grin; already more than familiar with what it is that comes next.

Uses the cover of early darkness to hide the silhouette of him playing along to their well-rehearsed show. Comes into his fist at the same moment Addison’s eyes blink open. Her teeth fiddling expertly at the skin below Meredith’s left ear.

She grins. Cocks her head a little to the side.

He shrugs. As though the whole tableau is nothing more than a typical Tuesday night.

 

 

 

His shoulder takes longer to heal than it probably should. Meredith bullies him into having scans that only serve to tell him what he already knows.

She teases him incessantly about his attempts at sporting glory but the tone of her words is less patronising than it once might have been.

Age has mellowed them both, no matter how vehemently they may try to deny it.

Addison busies herself scouting out orthopaedic surgeons while he protests the need to be sliced open at all. It is a fight he can’t possibly win and she kisses him softly, trails her lips across his chin and over the offending joint.

Whispered _I’m sorry_ s skim the surface of his skin. Like maybe she thinks it’s all her fault. His stupidity. His pathetic need to prove himself, even when he’s the only one who gives a damn.

He longs to tell her that it doesn’t matter. That _he’s_ the one that is sorry. But the words thicken and then die on his tongue.

Lost forever in a single exhale.

 

 

 

They come to him together, but it is Addison who speaks. 

He swallows her words, thick and choking, and wonders how fast he can run from whatever it is that comes next.

Meredith’s fingers twist into the hem of his t-shirt. He watches them work insistently at the fabric so that he doesn’t have to watch her.

Again, it is Addison who speaks. And later he’ll wonder whether the whole thing had been choreographed from the start. 

She spills words, whole sentences, paragraphs and entire novels, about babies and futures and a thousand other fantasies he’d long ago forbidden himself from imagining.

Meredith’s fingers stop their fiddling. There’s polish on her nails that he doesn’t think he’s ever noticed before and it seems almost counterintuitive for a surgeon to lacquer the parts of herself that she plunges into body cavities. Even if the shade is the palest pink he’s ever seen.

Addison keeps speaking. At least, he figures that she does. A sound vibrates through his rib-cage.

Hollow.

He thinks about Amber and how her tiny, tiny fingers used to curl around his, a grip so much tighter than it had any right to be. Like maybe she’d already figured out how hard she’d have to hold on to keep him around.

He thinks about all the myriad ways in which he failed her.

 

 

 

They wait until Addison floats out of the house on her too high heels before they so much as even _glance_ at each other.

Meredith shrugs. The fear etched, spider web-like, across her face, a complete mirror image of his own.

He’s fairly certain Addison doesn’t know about attempt number one for Meredith to have a child. One more broken down story that never quite made it to vocalised. After all:

_Oh, and by the way…_

She blinks and he thumbs away the tear that forms. Kisses her as gently as he’s ever managed to kiss anyone because the only words he can come up with right now are not words she needs to hear.

“Alex.”

His name. There’s no question this time. No plea. Just his name on her lips. A statement of fact.

The sweetest sound of all.

He pulls her towards him, wraps his body around hers as she folds into him completely. He buries his face in the soft curls that scatter across the pillow beneath them and sings a lullaby, the only one he’s ever know, into the nape of her neck.

 

 

 

 

Addison says she understands. His apprehension. Their apprehension.

He doesn’t think she does. Not really.

How can she possibly, after all?

But that is no more her fault than his dislocated shoulder was. Different scars to represent the same thing. He takes her out for breakfast and tries his best to explain. Figures it is the absolute least that she deserves.

Stutters over words like _Izzie_ and _Oh_ and _I can’t begin to fathom how I’ll ever make a decent parent…_

She smiles and locks her ankles with his under the table. Waits until he’s finished, breathless, before she speaks. Accuses him gently, impossibly careful and right up on the points of her tip toes, of not getting it. 

Any of it.

And he thinks that maybe it is her who doesn’t understand him then, because no, he probably doesn’t.

He very rarely does.

But she explains it, cotton soft. Runs her finger around the base of his thumb, lazy, looping circles he might just drown in. Gifts him words that he clings to, that it’s not just him. That it’s not just Meredith.

That they are not alone.

That it is them. Us. _We_.

_We are in this together…_

He nods dumbly. Let’s her promises lay loose on the table top between them.

 

 

 

They go to OB appointments as a group. The three of them. And it’s LA so no one so much as bats an eyelid at the implied arrangement. 

Meredith makes jokes about her hostile uterus and how it must have made an exception for his no doubt equally hostile sperm, as the doctor nods and smiles and pretends like she might just understand all the words between them that remain unspoken.

Addison buzzes incessantly. A high frequency hum that sets his teeth on edge. 

He drags her into cold shower after cold shower after cold shower. Sucks a nipple between his teeth as he hoists her hips high above his. A desperate attempt to keep her at a level that prevents Meredith from screeching for her to leave.

Or that it’s not her baby.

Or other unspeakable horrors he knows reach the tip of her tongue every now and then.

She is scared. _Terrified_. And he gets that.

Addison, he remains convinced, does not. She has far from crappy genes, after all.

 

 

 

He catches Meredith with her keys in her hand more than once. Freezes to stone every damn time. Holds her wrist with one hand while he dials Addison’s cell with the other.

Utterly convinced she’ll up and leave if he lets her go.

He feels like he’s the only thing keeping the three of them together. And the three of them together is the only thing he knows these days.

She cries. Screams. Rakes her fingernails down his chest like a brand and vows she’ll never speak to him again if he doesn’t let her go.

He refuses to listen because he knows her well enough to know that she doesn’t mean it. 

That she might even mean the polar opposite. And so he holds her tight, too tight.

And gives her an out.

_Stay for me? Please?_

 

 

 

On the days when the hormones aren’t raging their not so silent war, they walk along the beach with their toes in the winter chilled Pacific Ocean. Tucked tight into coats better suited to the Seattle snow as they bemoan the passing of summer.

The aching cold reminds him of Iowa and elevators. Of dead babies that leak down thighs and gun shots that echo through emptied out skulls.

Eyes that don’t blink and wives that smile and laugh and promise you the world, right before they die in your arms. 

And even though they do come back, sometimes, it is only to tear you to shreds all over again.

He vows to never be that cold again.

 

 

 

He plays gigs in packed out bars full of people that come more for the booze than for him and the boys. He is not stupid enough to believe anything else could be the truth.

But they cheer and whistle and stamp their feet, while girls younger than Amber grind against each other on the dance floor. Their eyes on him the whole time.

He borrows lyrics and makes them is own; _made it fourteen city blocks without breathing…_ and _it’s silent as I sink into the sea…_ and _sifting through the rubble for the wrong things…_

Does his level best not to lost his shit right there on the stage. Bright lights and the phantom smell of cigarette smoke that never really leeched out of the walls all those months and years ago.

He’s going to be a dad. 

The revelation is blinding.

 

 

 

There are too many ghosts that hang in the empty spaces. 

He refuses to let them name their son after any one of them.

Figures he might not be able to give the kid much, that the least he can offer is the chance to live his own life free from the shadow of someone he’s never met.

That he never will meet.

In the end he arrives a week early and almost ridiculously healthy. As though set to spite them from the start.

Tiny, tiny fingers curl around his, a grip so much tighter than it has any right to be. Like maybe his son’s already figured out how hard he’ll have to hold on to keep him around.

Pleads with a vehemence that is shocking, for things to be different this time ‘round.


End file.
